“I’m dying,” moaned Owongo, his face alternately pale and cold and flushed and hot. Owongo was a very distant ancestor of mine, a strange little hominid cove who lived (as did just about everyone else) in central Africa where they spent day in and day out naked.

Mirumda, his bloated and spotty wife, gazed down at him sympathetically. Her man was in a bad state, possibly dying, and her one big question was how would she survive if he were to die on her?

He was a man, and men do the hunting. He had muscles (of a sort) and men with muscles (of a sort) do all the lifting and carrying and defending of the hearth and home – or they would have defended the hearth if they had one, but being cave-dwellers of an unbelievable primitive kind, they didn’t. So without this man of hers, this squirming, moaning, groaning bunch of agony and snot lying on his fur-strewn cot, she would be lost. And there were the ankle-biters to think of. Who would thrash them when they did wrong? Not her, surely? She was the mother and provider of two huge and very pendulous breasts, not the disciplinarian.

“You not die!” she ordered Owongo. “Me get the doctor!”

“Not that quack!” groaned Owongo. “He give me worms to dissolve under my tongue and tell me I’ll either be better within seven days or dead within the week!”

“Quack better than no quack!” insisted Mirumda, and she scuttled (scuttled might be the wrong word for one as bloated as she) to the quack’s cave.

The quack in Owongo’s particular village was one Dr. Duckkk (pronounced duck-k-k) and he was in. He was not only in, but lying on his own fur-strewn cot, and moaning about dying to his good lady wife, Mrs Duckkk.

“Poor Owongo,” breathed Mrs Duckkk. “Tell him to place maggot under tongue and dissolve it slowly.”

“Will that cure him?” asked Mirumda doubtfully.

“Maybe not,” conceded Mrs Duckkk. “It not curing my quack man here!”

The doctor obligingly opened his mouth to groan, and half a dozen maggots crawled out.

“Bugger it,” clucked Mirumda, and returned back to her own cave where she found that Owongo was almost worse, if that was possible. Great green globules were descending his nostrils and being freely distributed all over the cave by a chain of far from feeble sneezes.

“Poor Owongo,” sighed Mirumda, and there was a sudden knock at where the door might have been had they gone to the trouble of erecting one.

“Mirumda see,” whispered a dying Owongo.

At the entrance to their cave stood Titty. She was the daughter of a family friend and accounted as being the most beautiful creature ever born because of the pert splendour of her huge firm breasts that contrasted wonderfully with her lithe figure and long, slender legs that in their turn were complemented, at the other extreme, with cascades of long and fragrant hair.

“Mamma’s sent me to see if I can do anything to help poor Owongo,” she said in her siren-like musical voice, flicking her hair with the casual fingers of one hand and smiling the way nobody had ever sighed before.

“Me see,” muttered Mirumda darkly. She had never been able to get over the fact that there was another woman on the planet who was so beautiful that even she fancied her.

“Titty here to help,” she informed Owongo.

The words were like the greatest of medicines. As the sound of them entered Owongo’s ears and percolated to his brain he seemed to perk up like few men had perked up before and Mirumda was astonished to see the vital effect they had on the sick man’s willy.

“Send her,” said Owongo.

Mirumda pointed at his groin. “Not with that like that!” she snapped. “Titty not like it,” she added.

Owongo settled back down and tried to concentrate his mind on any one of a boring range of neutral things like Annus Widdicumbus, the plump dancing witch from an adjacent village, a woman widely considered to be without any sexual appeal at all, which attribute actually seemed to please her.

“Mirumda tell Titty that Owongo better,” she decided, and she scuttled once again in the direction of the cave entrance.

Owongo heard her words quite plainly as she spoke to the young woman at the cave entrance, and he groaned. “It’s just been a case of man-flu,” his good lady explained to Titty. “He better now.”

“Good old Owongo,” sighed Titty. “I’ve heard man-flu can be dreadful! If only us women could catch it, then we’d know what it’s like…”

“If only…” whispered Mirumda, and the two women winked knowingly at each other.

I am a 68 year old male happily married to his lovely wife Dorothy. We enjoy the simpler things in life together. I also gain a great deal of inner peace by expressing my sometimes wacky thoughts as blogs. I also enjoy writing poetry, sometimes concernin